


find me a way (i'll be yours in a landslide)

by everyatom



Category: The West Wing
Genre: AU where Josh uses his 760 verbal to communicate effectively, Angst with a Happy Ending, Drama & Romance, F/M, Happily Every After, Interpersonal Intrigue, Panic Attacks, Political Angst, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, This will not be apolitical, season 6 AU, you're gonna suffer but you're gonna be happy about it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:13:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23742088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyatom/pseuds/everyatom
Summary: Season 6 AU where Josh and Donna meet the bare minimum for healthy communication, and it makes all the difference.
Relationships: Josh Lyman/Donna Moss
Comments: 13
Kudos: 52





	1. 00.

**00.**

“I gotta get over to the OEOB,” Josh said as he went over his to-do list in his head. He knew that Donna was saying something, but he was still processing his conversation with Leo.

“You have to sit down and talk to me,” Donna said. “That’s what you have to—”

He brushed her off, putting her out of his mind. “You’re very demanding today. You and Leo, who thinks I should be wandering the American Byways in search of the next president.” 

“I quit.”

He turned at her words. She didn’t shout, and she didn’t beg, but he could hear it in her voice. As he looked over her face, he could see it in her eyes. He had missed something.

—————

“What are you doing, Ma?” Josh asked as he opened the fridge. He pulled out the orange juice, preparing to drink from the bottle.

“A glass, Joshua,” responded Mira Lyman, without even looking up from her work. “And I’m preparing a lecture for this Friday.”

Josh sheepishly went to the cabinet and pulled down a glass. He poured himself half a glass of juice, and then decided he better get some for his mother as well.

“You’re giving a talk?” He moved toward the table and sat across from her. His mother was a child psychologist with a research fellowship at a local university, but she occasionally gave guest lectures to different programs.

“I was asked to present some of my research to the Early Education majors,” she said, patting his cheek in thanks for handing her the juice. 

“That sounds...fun, I guess,” Josh said. He knew his mother had an important job, but he was also a sixteen-year-old boy, and he was more focused on segueing into asking what's for dinner.

His mother glanced at him knowingly. He flushed under her gaze, smiling sheepishly. 

“It is fun,” she said. “I’ll be telling them about the Theory of Mind, specifically about the data I gathered from observing my own son.” Her teasing tone told him that she was kidding, but he couldn’t resist throwing a barb back.

“That sounds unethical, Ma,” he said with a grin. “Although since I’m the subject, I’m sure the data is above reproach.”

Her eyes softened as she reached forward to fix his wild hair. “You are the gift that keeps giving, bubbele.”

Josh fought against the instinct that told him he was too old for such affection. He saw the way his friends acted with their mothers, and he knew they’d call him Mama’s Boy. But he couldn’t bring himself to push her away. It made her so happy, and...

Shaking himself from that train of thought, he watched as his mother stood from her seat. She walked to the refrigerator and began pulling out several ingredients to make dinner. 

“What’s this mind theory?” he asked.

She started to chop an onion, pondering his question. After a moment, she began to explain.

“Theory of Mind, bubbele,” she corrected. “It is an idea of how children and people come to understand the thoughts and feelings of other people as being separate from their own.”

Josh hummed in acknowledgment. “I’m guessing it’s not automatic.”

“No,” she laughed, pointing the knife at him. “It is not automatic. It is actually very complex, and many people debate the parameters of its utility.”

Josh filed those words away to add to his SAT vocabulary flashcards—parameter, utility, automatic. 

“So it’s like, empathy?” That’s what it sounded like to him.

“It is directly related to empathy, but that’s not it,” Mira said. “The theory basically calls for us to understand how a child realizes that their perspective is different from the perspective of other people.”

“I don’t get it,” Josh replied honestly. 

Mira laughed, not unkindly. “That’s okay, there are many who don’t. Let me show you.”

She grabbed two bowls and used them to cover two different colored peppers, letting him see which pepper was under which bowl. “Now, turn around for a moment. Good.”

He heard movement, but turned back when she told him to.

“Now, where is the yellow pepper?” 

He pointed to the bowl on the right. She lifted the bowl, showing him that there was no pepper beneath the bowl. 

“This shows something called a false-belief. You believed the pepper was still under the bowl, even though it wasn’t. This does not mean you are lying, only that there are some things outside your knowledge.”

He nodded in understanding. “So it’s like object permanence?”

“Not quite,” she said. “Now let’s try again.”

She pulled the pepper from the pocket of her apron, and she placed it beneath the bowl.

“Do I turn around again?”

“No, now I will turn around, and you must move the pepper.”

He did so, tucking the pepper behind a bouquet of flowers. He gave her the okay to turn around.

“I will explain. You know where the pepper is, but I do not. I have the belief that the pepper is still beneath the bowl. You would expect me to look under the bowl. But if you were a child, you might not understand that just because you know where it is, that does not mean I know as well.”

“Uh—”

“Let me say again,” she paused. “It is good to practice before Friday, bubbele. Now I am finding the words. If you were a young child, say two or three years old, you would know where the pepper was. And when you told me to turn around, you might think I should know where the pepper is too. You would attribute your own beliefs to me as well, thinking that we both know the same things. So when I look for the pepper under the bowl, you might laugh or think I was silly for not knowing you hid it behind the flowers.”

Josh looked at the pepper for a moment. He liked it when his mother talked to him like he was an adult, not just some teenager or her baby. “And so this is what you do with your clients?”

“Yes,” she said. “But you know right now, I am working specifically with early childhood trauma, and how it affects the development of theory of mind in children.”

“That sounds pretty interesting,” he admitted, not even having to lie. “And I can see how this could be important for people who work with little kids.”

Mira nodded, encouraging him to continue.

“Kids don’t always know, you know, why other kids act certain ways. They might think all their friends think the same thing, but they don’t. And it’s pretty cool that we learn how to understand that everyone has thoughts and feelings.”

“Very cool,” she said with a smile. “The coolest, in my opinion.”

“The precursor for a democratic pluralistic society, one could say,” Josh laughed. 

“So that’s what’s wrong with Congress.”

—————

Josh pulled himself out of the memory, and found himself staring at Donna. The look in her eyes was pained, and he could feel the resignation in her gaze. 

“I—” he began. “What? No, let’s—”

Donna appeared unmoved by his stammering. He tried to see beyond the walls that had followed her home from Gaza, but he found nothing, only a tacit understanding that he was meeting her expectations by failing to listen to her.

This was a moment; he knew in his gut that this was one of those choices that came along that changed the course of your life. He could see her walking away. He could feel the weight of her absence already, and it was crushing. 

_ “No, you don’t,”  _ he wanted to say.  _ “Walk with me, walk beside me, walk back to me always,” _ almost tumbled off his tongue.

He found the words somewhere inside him.

“Talk to me?”


	2. 01.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notice of a description of a panic attack at the beginning of the chapter. If you'd like to skip, begin reading at "'Sorry,' he offered, his voice raspy." Take care of yourselves, folks.

**01.**

> “His love for her was the core of his life. There is a great danger to such a love. When the loved one is lost, the life is lost. It crumbles to pieces.” —Tennessee Williams, from  _ The Collected Stories _ , “Something by Tolstoi”

“Talk to me?”

As he formed the words, a buzzing filled his head. Cotton crawled up his throat, and sand poured into his lungs. 

Josh did not process how they moved from the bullpen into his office, but he had a vague realization that Donna was leading him to a chair. She was saying something, and he could feel her hand on his arm, but he could also feel the cold of the cement beneath his feet, smell the beginning wisps of smoke in the air, taste the adrenaline on his tongue. He closed his eyes against the sight of a closed front door, a door between him and—

“Josh, can you hear me?” Joanie murmured. “Listen to my voice.”

He nodded. He could hear her. He had never been able to hear her before.

“Will you count breaths with me?” Joanie—no, Donna asked. “In for four counts, hold for seven, out for eight counts.”

She was close, Josh knew. He could feel her breaths on his hands, even as he tried to concentrate on breathing around the sand. 

A few moments later, he was able to focus on the weight of her hand on his arm. She didn’t usually touch him without asking, when he had one of his attacks. It had been a while, but the sick feeling as his breathing returned to normal was not new.

“Sorry,” he offered, his voice raspy.

Donna remained quiet for a few moments, weighing her words in her mind. “You don’t need to be sorry, ever, about this.”

“Okay,” he responded half-heartedly. He rubbed at his eyes, trying to massage away the stinging heat of unshed tears.

“It’s been a while since you’ve had one of these.” Donna spoke slowly, as if she was afraid to upset him again. “Have you been taking your medicine?”

He nodded, because he took it every morning. He wasn’t the best at keeping doctor’s appointments, and he didn’t always know he had pushed too far before crashing, but he took his medication. That, and Leo, was what kept him in this job. He knew that.

Josh found the will to open his eyes, and he saw Donna kneeling before him, holding his wrists loosely in her hands. He couldn’t decipher what she was thinking—when had he stopped being able to know her thoughts based on her eyes? But he knew she was concentrating on him.

“Would you like me to move your afternoon appointments?” she asked.

He sighed. He could make them, maybe, but his brain felt like soggy lettuce. The thought of moving made his chest tighten up.

“Please.”

Donna stood up, brushing her knees, and moved toward the door. Closing the door behind her, she went to her desk to make the calls, and Josh allowed himself to drift for a few moments.

Some time later, she came back inside his office. She closed the door softly.

“I cleared the next two hours, and told the OEOB you couldn’t come over in person right now, but to expect your call.”

Efficient Donna, perfect Donna, valuable Donna—the woman who knew what he needed before he could form the thought, let alone the words. How could he have ignored her so grievously?

And it all came rushing back. She  _ quit _ .

“You quit,” he said, his eyes hardening. His hackles rose, and although he understood that in this situation he was the electrocuted squirrel in the back alley fighting for his life against a stray cat, he prepared himself to fight to win.

Donna hesitated, before nodding. She looked down at her fingers, as if her manicure was more interesting than abandoning him.

“You don’t quit,” he said, trying to get a rise out of her. Any immediate impulse to talk things through had fled in the wake of his vulnerability in that moment. He didn’t know how to do anything but fight, and she was looking at him like he was a newborn puppy. He needed her to fight.

Her head snapped up, and her eyes narrowed. 

_ “Victory,” _ he thought.

“I did, Josh,” she said, her voice tinged with warning. “And I’m sorry that it’s hard for you. But this is something that I need to do for myself.”

He could feel his blood pressure rising.

“No, you don’t,” he insisted, “and it’s not a good idea to use that as some kind of bargaining chip to get your way. It’s manipulative, and it’s beneath you.”

Donna looked as though she wanted to respond with equal ire, but he knew the moment she backed down.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to talk about this now,” she said. “We can talk when you feel better.”

“Oh, so before, we had to talk right away, but now we can talk later? Consistency is key, Donna,” he said, sarcasm weaving through each of his words.

“That was before you almost had a panic attack in the middle of the bullpen!” Her voice rose with the flush in her cheeks, and if his world wasn’t ending, he’d imagine she got pink all over.

“Well thanks for being such a supportive friend,” he bit back. “But if I wanted someone to take care of me, I’d put in a request to Human Resources.”

She looked at him as though he had slapped her. She blinked as though she had never seen him before, and then she turned around to leave.

Joshua Lyman lived for the last word. It was one of his five major food groups, and he was sure that no high would match the rush he got from winning a fight.

But this didn’t feel like winning. It felt like dying.

“Donna, wait—I—I didn’t mean that,” he backtracked desperately.

“Then why did you say it?” She hadn’t turned around, but his years of experience with Donna told him she was close to tears.

“Because I’m an asshole,” he said honestly, “and I wanted to win.”

She did look at him now, disbelief all over her face. “This isn’t an election, or a House Resolution. I told you I wanted to talk, and you wouldn’t listen. This is where we are.”

“Then let’s talk!” he exclaimed in frustration. “We can’t talk if you quit, and we can’t talk if you leave. Both of those things are antithetical to conversation.” 

“You know what else is antithetical to conversation?” She responded. “You ignoring me, you refusing to listen to me, you doing everything you can to avoid talking to me.”

Josh felt the fight rush out of him. The thing with Donna was that although he knew exactly which buttons to push, which sore spots to prod, she knew the same for him. The result was an exhausting, fruitless argument that left him feeling defeated and guilty.

“Can you blame me?” His voice softened, his tone betraying his vulnerability. “I’m not ready to say goodbye to you.”

He chanced a look at Donna, only to find her returning his gaze with an incredulous expression.

“Josh,” she started, “this isn’t goodbye. This is, I need a better salary so I can pay my hospital bills. I’m not trying to leave you. I just need a different job.”

“This is about a raise?” He couldn’t believe this. “Are you serious, Donna? Quitting does not get you a raise.”

“It’s not just about the money,” she denied. “It’s everything, Josh.” 

Donna looked away, wringing her hands together. Josh had always known Donna to wear her intentions on her face, and he never had to wonder what she was thinking, because she would usually tell him right away. But her sudden inability to articulate her feelings left him in the dark. He could feel her slipping away.

“I don’t understand,” he whispered, honestly. “Is it me, then? Because you don’t have to quit. We can figure something else out.”

“Not everything is about you, Josh,” Donna replied wetly. She turned her eyes to the ceiling and wiped her red-rimmed eyes.

Josh hated the thought of her crying.

“It’s everything,” she repeated after a moment. “I come here, and I answer these phones, and I can’t breathe. I can’t help but think about how I am the only one who survived the car bomb, but out of everyone in that car, I was probably the least important.”

There was a coldness that washed over Josh whenever he thought of the hours after learning Donna had been injured, possibly fatally so. When he thought of how she had looked in the hospital bed, of how scared her eyes had been, he struggled to do anything but press it down. They had never really talked about what had happened in Gaza, or even in Germany, but he had assumed that she would tell him if something was wrong. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Donna—” he said. “Donna, that’s not true.”

She ignored him. “I’m proud of the work that I’ve done in this job. But I still feel like I would have been an ‘also dead.’ I don’t wish I had died, but it doesn’t make sense to me that I’m didn’t. There were Congressmen and women in that car. Admiral Fitzwallace was in that car. These people who had the ability to effect change on a world scale were beside me, but I’m the one who survived.”

She paused, still not looking at him. He barely breathed; he was so afraid of interrupting her.

“And I’ve been trying for months, even before Gaza, to talk about how I could grow, or do more. But you’ve made it clear that you don’t think I can do more here, so I need to find somewhere I can.”

He swallowed heavily, noting that she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Donna, I—I didn’t know you felt like this. That you thought I didn’t think you could—”

“How could you?” She said, finally looking at him. “You barely look at me, and you don’t listen when I talk.”

Before he could respond, his phone started to ring. As if on autopilot, Donna picked it up.

“Josh Lyman’s office,” she spoke into the receiver. “Mm-hmm. Let me put you on hold.” She did so, before standing up. “OEOB is on the phone for you; they got tired of waiting.”

She was walking toward the door, and Josh felt everything slipping from his fingers. 

“Wait, Donna—we’re not done.”

She offered him a small smile, as if she didn’t believe him. “I don’t know what else there is to say, Joshua.” And she closed the door behind her.

—————

Josh didn’t know how he made it through the rest of the day, but by the time he left his office, the bullpen was quiet, and Donna wasn’t at her desk. He had thought about what she said for hours, and there was so much he didn’t understand. He knew that she had been through something awful, but she seemed fine. She seemed to bounce back. 

He had cancelled some lunch meetings, but it wasn’t because he was avoiding her. He was busy, and he knew she’d understand. Well, he thought she would understand. But apparently she didn’t. 

As he packed his backpack and made his way out of the White House, he knew that he couldn’t let things sit like they were. He had to understand, had to make sure she understood. 

He tried to think about work without her, and he saw himself caving to the pressures of the White House. He tried to think about what his days might look like without being able to talk to her, and they seemed strangely silent. 

_ “It’s not about you, _ ” he reminded himself. “ _ It’s not just about you. It’s about her too. And she’s unhappy.” _

He got into his car, turning it on as he prepared to drive home. NPR was on in the background, but he wasn’t listening. The stresses of today had exhausted him, and he knew that sleep would be elusive for the few hours’ break he had. But he also knew that even trying to sleep while worrying about Donna would be a fruitless endeavor.

Donna was a constant, a foundation that enabled everything else to run smoothly. And if something was wrong with her, something was wrong with everything. 

He knew what he had to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a lot for them to work out, and it won't all be at once. But I hope you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, even if they can't.

**Author's Note:**

> Any and all recognizable characters, plotlines, and canon material belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells, Warner Bros. Television, and their partners. This work is for personal enjoyment, and I will not receive any monetary compensation for its publishing.


End file.
